In the fall of 1990, the music producer George Drakoulias began gently harassing one of his longtime heroes: Tom Petty.
Both men were working in separate rooms at a Los Angeles recording studio. Drakoulias had been obsessed with Petty ever since he was a teenager in the Long Island suburb Syosset. He had to meet him.
“I staked out the parking lot, but he had a private entrance,” Drakoulias said one afternoon from his Hollywood office, where he works as a film and television music supervisor. “I left fruit baskets — ‘From your friends in Studio B’ — and heard nothing.” Undeterred, he sent a neatly typed, sternly worded letter daring the singer and his band to compete in a pool match. “Rejection of such challenge,” the missive warned, “will result in confirmation or your being half-men.” Drakoulias had already made records with the likes of Roy Orbison, the Cult and Glenn Danzig. He wasn’t easily intimidated.
Drakoulias never got a response — even after he sent a follow-up apology. But a few years later, the two finally met, and Drakoulias was able to grill Petty about his music. “I asked him the most juvenile fanboy questions about songwriting and bridges,” he said. “I had a lot of moxie.”
The two went on to work on multiple albums, as well as a Grammy-winning documentary. It was a bond forged through a combination of persistence, luck and serendipity — as is the case with many of Drakoulias’s long-running creative relationships.
In his nearly 25-year career as a music supervisor, Drakoulias has worked on blockbuster films like “Joker” and “Barbie,” as well the smash Apple TV+ series “Severance,” for which he recently received his first Emmy nomination.
“He has a forensic knowledge of recording and music history,” Ben Stiller, a “Severance” executive producer, said in an email. “He’s sort of like a doctor who knows things you don’t, but makes it all seem very accessible.”
Stiller gave Drakoulias his first music-supervision job, on the 2001 film “Zoolander.” (It was Drakoulias’s suggestion, Stiller said, to add the ebullient Wham! single “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go” to a scene in which a group of male models start carelessly playing with gasoline.)
But Drakoulias, who sports thick, dark-rimmed glasses and a free-range gray beard, doesn’t just help select and secure songs. He’s also served as a sort of all-purpose artistic consigliere for numerous musicians and filmmakers, including Wes Anderson and Noah Baumbach.
Some of Drakoulias’s most significant pop-cultural contributions have occurred seemingly by chance. Like the time in the late 1980s, when he stopped into an Atlanta Kentucky Fried Chicken and a local teen tipped him off to the band that would become the Black Crowes. (Drakoulias produced the group’s first two albums.) Or the time in the early 2000s, when he stumbled upon the turreted Manhattan home that Anderson later adopted as the setting for “The Royal Tenenbaums” (a character in Anderson’s follow-up, “The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou,” received Drakoulias’s surname).
Drakoulias, who described himself as “a footnote,” isn’t sure how he became a divining rod for so many artists. But Stiller doesn’t believe it’s a coincidence that the 60-year-old Drakoulias has found himself in the middle of so many epochal movements and moments: “He is a guy who talented people are attracted to.”
Drakoulias has lived in Los Angeles since 1989, having arrived as a music-biz veteran. While much of his time is spent in meetings or on a film or TV set, Drakoulias began his career as a live performer, playing bass in multiple bands while still in high school, sometimes landing gigs at the Manhattan venue Max’s Kansas City. It was around that time that Drakoulias got his first experience as a producer, recording 8-track demos for his group Lifeline.
“That’s where I became the boss,” he said. “I wasn’t the songwriter. I was the one saying, ‘We need to change this here, we need to add this part here.”
In the early 1980s, Drakoulias headed to New York University to study music and business, and met Rick Rubin, who hired him to work at the then-nascent Def Jam label.
“I was an intern and the only employee, so I called myself vice president,” Drakoulias said. He helped out during recording sessions, called up radio stations under multiple aliases to goose airplay, and, at one point, walked the streets handing out cassettes of LL Cool J’s landmark album “Radio.”
Drakoulias eventually stopped focusing on his classes, instead spending long hours working in the studio, or hanging around the city with the Beastie Boys, who name-checked him on the 1989 album “Paul’s Boutique” (“Went from the station to Orange Julius / I brought a hot dog — from who? — George Drakoulias.”)
“Being in the Beasties’ sphere, you were the prince of the city — you could go wherever you want,” he said. “And it was the perfect time to be there: Uptown was coming downtown. You’d see Warhol and Basquiat. You’d go to Danceteria five, six nights a week,” he added, of the club where Madonna got her start.
By the late 1980s, Drakoulias had moved into music production. After a catching an early gig by the Black Crowes in New York City — then called Mr. Crowe’s Garden — he spent months pursuing the band before heading into the studio to record “Shake Your Money Maker,” the group’s multiplatinum 1990 debut.
In the lead-up to the album, Drakoulias steered them toward records that would help shape the band’s sound and maintained a light touch with songwriting.
“His approach isn’t to be bombastic — it’s more of a nudge,” said Rich Robinson, the band’s guitarist. “We would send him songs and George would be like, ‘Keep it up, buddy. Keep trying.’ We were looking for more direction, but he wanted us to find it on our own. It helped us find our voice.”
In the years that followed, Drakoulias produced albums by the Jayhawks, Maria McKee, and Petty. As the music industry destabilized in the early 2000s — and as Drakoulias watched bands start breaking up — he slowly transitioned into music supervision, working on multiple films for directors like Stiller and Baumbach.
With “Severance,” the sci-fi drama about a mysterious workplace, Drakoulias has once again found himself in the middle of a phenomenon. The show received 27 Emmy nominations this year — the most for any series — including a nod for Drakoulias’s work on the season finale, “Cold Harbor,” which featured unexpected but inspired cues like the Alan Parsons Project’s spacey anthem “Sirius” and Mel Tormé’s rendition of “The Windmills of Your Mind.”
Choosing songs for “Severance,” Drakoulias noted, is a collaborative process, and he’s reluctant to take credit for any particular tune. But Stiller said that Drakoulias will send “vast playlists of songs I’ve never heard” to help shape the show’s musical identity. When a Season 1 episode needed an up-tempo number for a lively (yet very corporate) dance scene, Drakoulias suggested the jazz artist Joe McPhee’s 1971 live cut “Shakey Jake.”
“George knew it had to get agro and crazy,” Stiller said, “and he found that song which really made the sequence.”
The decade- and genre-spanning musical palette of “Severance,” Drakoulias noted, is reflective of both the series’ trippy premise, and of the fact that platforms like TikTok have made it possible for songs of all styles and eras to suddenly re-emerge.
“The whole linear thing is gone now,” he said. “Anything can pop at any minute.”
For Drakoulias, the endless need for compelling new songs in music and television — even if they happen to be old songs — is one of the allures of his job. In his office, he lifted the cover of a 78 RPM record player and cued up “I Love Life,” a 1940s novelty hit by the high-pitched singer Jerry Colonna. He found the tune while working on “The Mosquito Bowl,” a forthcoming World War II film featuring a sequence set at a United Service Organizations’ show.
“I love deep dives into a period,” he said. “Researching a song, finding a 78, transferring it and sending it over to the actor.”
As “I Love Life” played, Drakoulias gave a tour of his work space, which features several artifacts from his career: a framed poster for a 1986 concert featuring the Beastie Boys and Run-DMC; vinyl test-pressings of a forthcoming Black Crowes reissue; and, tacked to the wall, his 1990 letter to Petty.
Drakoulias had long forgotten about writing the note. But a copy was found earlier this year, in the singer’s archives, more than three decades since Drakoulias first tried to win over the musician.
“Isn’t that crazy?” Drakoulias said. “He never wrote back. And he never mentioned it. But he thought it was funny enough to save it. I’m not gonna lie: When I got it, I just started crying.”
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